Recognition of Signed Expressions in an Experimental System Supporting Deaf Clients in the City Office

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Apr 13;20(8):2190. doi: 10.3390/s20082190.

Abstract

The paper addresses the recognition of dynamic Polish Sign Language expressions in an experimental system supporting deaf people in an office when applying for an ID card. A method of processing a continuous stream of RGB-D data and a feature vector are proposed. The classification is carried out using the k-nearest neighbors algorithm with dynamic time warping, hidden Markov models, and bidirectional long short-term memory. The leave-one-subject-out protocol is used for the dataset containing 121 Polish Sign Language sentences performed five times by four deaf people. A data augmentation method is also proposed and tested. Preliminary observations and conclusions from the use of the system in a laboratory, as well as in real conditions with an experimental installation in the Office of Civil Affairs are given.

Keywords: computer vision; human–computer interface; sign language recognition.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Deafness / pathology
  • Humans
  • Markov Chains
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Sign Language*